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Hollywood’s Chinoiserie

GRAUMAN’S CHINESE THEATRE, HOLLYWOOD (Photo by author)

Hollywood is famous furnisher of mysteries.

—Charlie Chan

THE NEW YORKER in 1929 printed a cartoon showing a child standing in a movie-theater lobby and asking, “Mama—does God live here?” The child, clinging to his mother’s side, looks awe-struck. The cartoon contains more than just a kernel of truth. “Picture palaces” such as the Roxy, Mark Strand, Capitol, Imperial, Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese, Tivoli, and Howard—all extravagantly designed with art deco flamboyance or rococo motifs—shot up in such major cities as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta. They reflected the gaudy splendor and the “unparalleled plenty” of that decade.

The motion picture, having come of age during the Great War, consolidated its position as America’s dominant mass medium. What we know of film—as an art, an industry, and a state of mind—all took hold during the decade. Even before the advent of talking pictures, a Hollywood lifestyle had come into being.¹ Before World War I, movies had begun to shed the infamy of their origin in shabby storefront nickelodeons and had become a respectable form of entertainment. It was in the 1920s, however, when movies began to grab the lion’s share of what German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno would call the “culture industry,” taking center stage in the consciousness of the American people.

As Robert Sklar tells us in his classic work, Movie-Made America, “every large city and most medium-sized towns boasted at least one brand-new sumptuous picture palace” in the late 1920s. Sklar, one of the best historians of American film, re-creates for us the experience of “going to the pictures” at that time:

Outside on the sidewalk stood a doorman, attired in frock coat with white gloves, waiting to open your car door and direct you to the ticket booth. If it was raining, he held an umbrella over your head; if snowing, an usher in the lobby rushed forward to brush off your coat. You passed from usher to usher as you moved through ornate lobby corridors, hushed by the atmosphere of an Egyptian temple or a baroque palace that had provided the inspiration for architectural imitation.

Once you entered the auditorium, there was yet another phalanx of ushers. One of them, next to the automatic seating boards, would tell you which seats were empty, and the other, holding a flashlight, would then take you to your seat. “There, after live stage performances, musical interludes played by an orchestra numbering up to thirty pieces, a newsreel and a travelogue, you saw what you had come for—a feature film, accompanied by its own especially arranged musical score.”²

It was during the time that Sklar calls “the radiant dawn of popular mass culture” that Charlie Chan appeared as an icon in the American imagination. As the honorable detective once said, “A thousand-mile journey begins with one step.”³ His cinematic career, however, had more than one false step, especially during the silent-film era.

In 1926, a year after the publication of The House Without a Key, Pathé, a pioneering movie company well known for its newsreels and comedies, produced a ten-chapter serial based on Biggers’s book. Directed by Spencer G. Bennett, then known as the “King of Serial Directors,” the silent film featured George Kuwa as Charlie Chan. A Japanese actor who had appeared in fifty-eight silent and sound films at the time of his death in 1931, Kuwa could pass muster for the “very fat” Chan of Biggers’s novel. Kamiyama Sojin, who in 1927 played Chan in The Chinese Parrot, directed by Hollywood’s “golden boy,” Paul Leni, was described by Biggers as “a corking actor” but “a long, thin, sinister Chink,” hardly the fat sleuth of the novel.⁴ Biggers might have gotten the physical description right, but Sojin was not a “Chink.” Like Kuwa, who also appeared in the film, Sojin was what Biggers might have called a “Jap.”

The choice of Japanese actors to play Charlie Chan, given the fact that he is so vehemently anti-Japanese in the novels, might seem odd, but such casting seemed completely understandable at the time. The film industry, especially in the 1920s, abounded with such ironies. Paradoxically, as feelings intensified against foreigners and new immigrants—best exemplified by the sensational Sacco and Vanzetti case—those responsible for the creation of the movie industry (and, in effect, mass American culture) were predominantly foreigners themselves. As David Robinson notes in his monograph, Hollywood in the Twenties, it is interesting to consider the “foreign” origins of the people who were responsible for the development of the movies and who ruled the American cinema in the 1920s and beyond. Adolph Zukor, the original founder of Paramount Pictures, was born in Hungary to a Jewish family and immigrated to America at the age of sixteen “with forty dollars sewn in the lining of his suit.” Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, came to the United States from Germany in 1884 and “worked for years in menial jobs.” Louis B. Mayer, cofounder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was born Lazar Meir in Minsk and “started his life in the new world as a beachcomber and scrap dealer.” Like his future MGM partner, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) was also a Polish Jew who left Warsaw on foot, penniless, and started off in upstate New York’s garment business. And William Fox, the man who founded the company that would one day produce most of the Charlie Chan films, was born Wilhelm Fried in Hungary; at the age of seven, he had to support his impoverished family by working as a peddler.⁵

In short, the people who built the American cinema were also the very people whom the 1924 Immigration Act now excluded. The other obvious targets of the Johnson-Reed Act were of course the Japanese. Like their Jewish and Eastern European counterparts, the Japanese created a strong presence in early American movies, despite the prevalent racism of the time. The most famous Japanese actor in Hollywood was Sessue Hayakawa. Born Kintaro Hayakawa in Chiba, Japan, in 1889, Hayakawa was the third son of the governor of the prefecture. After failing in his training as a naval officer and a suicide attempt, he came to America in 1911 to study political economics at the University of Chicago. A martial artist, he played quarterback for the university football team and made good use of his jujitsu skills. Hayakawa recalled that period in his memoir, Zen Showed Me the Way (published in 1960):

No matter how big a man came at me in blocking practice, upon contact he wound up flat on the field, out of play. I simply employed taiatari, judo body technique. After my first real game, it was noised about the campus that I possessed occult power. But a good thing can’t last. The second season I played, the members of an opposing team complained. The use of judo or jujitsu was promptly forbidden. Once and [sic] a while thereafter, however, in the heat of the game I would forget; and after the University of Chicago varsity was penalized ten and fifteen yards four or five times, I was put off the team. So much for football.⁶

A chance visit to the Japanese Theater in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles sparked his interest in acting, and he adopted a stage name, “Sessue,” meaning “snowy island.” Hayakawa got his first major role in Thomas Ince’s The Typhoon (1914). The next year, he starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat, which instantly propelled him to stardom.

A precursor to Rudolph Valentino, Hayakawa became a matinee idol whose exotic appearance suggested forbidden love. According to one seemingly apocryphal tabloid story, Hayakawa one day emerged from a limousine in front of a theater and was about to step into a puddle when “dozens of female fans surrounding his car fell over one another to spread their fur coats at his feet.”⁷ At the height of his career, he made $5,000 a week, on a par with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. In 1918, unhappy with the roles he had played in the films and determined to portray a Japanese person “as he really is and not the way fiction paints him,” he established his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, which made twenty-three films in three years, amassing $2 million in profit each of those years. Yet his corona shone briefly. In 1922, as racial animosity toward Japanese heightened, and censorship increased after the appointment of William Hays as the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Hayakawa left the country to pursue his career in Europe and Japan.

A media star, says film historian Richard Dyer, is a paradox in itself, a person who embodies tensions between multiple meanings and affects.⁸ Thus, Hayakawa’s sensational stardom at a time when anti-Japanese racism was on the rise can be explained in several ways. Perhaps film from its very beginning has been regarded as a potential threat to traditional values and mainstream beliefs. Especially in its early days, before the adoption of the restrictive Hays Code and other moralistic guidelines, cinema appeared not only as transgressive but outright revolutionary. A plethora of risqué flicks, bloodcurdling horror movies, and vampire fare caused no small disturbance for Main Street America. Hollywood, it appears, has always been a haven for eccentrics and foreigners, a fact that would play into the hands of conservative forces in the days of McCarthyism.

No doubt Hayakawa’s popularity also resulted from the “Japan craze” that had begun in the late nineteenth century but lingered on until after World War I. For many decades, Japan’s art, architecture, costumes, and lifestyle fascinated Americans. The rise of Japan as a world power after its stunning defeat of Russia in 1905 had elevated its status in the American mind. The acclaim for Hayakawa, then, oddly suggested a strange mixture of xenophobia and xenophilia. Moreover, Hayakawa’s success was also a result of savvy promotional techniques that exploited such contradictions in American culture. Walking a fine line between nativism and Japonisme, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company orchestrated a careful and quite deliberate strategy as it made The Cheat and other films starring Hayakawa. Daisuke Miyao, in his book-length study of the Japanese matinee idol, observed:

Lasky’s strategy was to locate Hayakawa in the movable middle-ground position in the racial and cultural hierarchy between white American and nonwhite other. On the one hand, Hayakawa’s (and his characters’) status had to be raised and distinguished racially or culturally from other nonwhite actors (and their characters) in order for the American middle-class audiences to sympathize with, identify with, or even desire Hayakawa more easily. On the other hand, Hayakawa’s status had to be clearly differentiated from white Americans in terms of race. Any sexual relationship between Hayakawa’s characters…and white women must be avoided in order not to cause any anxiety around miscegenation.⁹

Most improbably, a Japanese star had been born, in the midst of rising calls that “Japs must go!”

Following in Hayakawa’s footsteps, George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin entered the Hollywood scene soon thereafter. Not nearly as successful as Hayakawa, these two actors nonetheless appeared in more than a hundred films, playing mostly evil and villainous Asian roles. Unfortunately, the reels of The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot have been lost, so we do not have a reliable means to assess the quality of their performances as the Chinese detective. But we do know that these two silent films constituted a rocky start for Charlie Chan. In fact, they almost killed off Chan’s Hollywood career. In 1929, when Fox adapted Behind That Curtain, Biggers’s third novel, it virtually wrote Charlie Chan out of the script! Billed last and played by a bald, British-accented E. L. Park, Chan appears for no more than a minute in an hour-long film. His supposed talkie debut, then, can hardly be called a Charlie Chan flick.

Despite Chan’s near-disappearance from the screen, the tradition of depicting Asians as bogeymen and villainous predators who challenged the very essence of Caucasian purity was so well established that, Chan or not, it had become a fixture of American film culture. In fact, beginning with two short reels by Thomas Edison, Chinese Laundry Scene (1895) and Dancing Chinamen-Marionettes (1898), the foreign, exotic quality of the Chinese had become, as Graham Hodges puts it, “a staple of American filmmaking.”¹⁰ From narrative themes and set décor to costumes, a faux-Chinese ambience permeated Hollywood films, bringing to the mass audience once-forbidden pleasures through the display and consumption of exotic objects.¹¹ In this regard, Hollywood Orientalism was a variation, albeit far more accessible and affordable, of the Chinatown bus tour, which had just become fashionable in such cities as New York and San Francisco. In this curious form of “rubbernecking,” a tourist could visit Chinatown on a bus that had ascending rows of seats like in a theater, equipped with a “megaphone man” who would ad-lib comments on the passing scenes of exotica.¹²

Hollywood’s fascination with Chinese culture culminated in 1927 with the grand opening of the spectacularly ornate Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Financed jointly by Sidney Grauman, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the $2 million theater was a Mount Olympus in the land of orange groves. At the groundbreaking ceremony, the sponsors invited Anna May Wong to shovel the first spadeful of dirt. In her Chinese silk robe, Wong looked rather like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Ever since her debut in 1919, she had almost instantly metamorphosed from a Chinese laundryman’s daughter to a Hollywood star, and she was indisputably the most important female Chinese symbol of the era. Not long after the Grauman’s ceremony, she would make a cameo appearance in The Chinese Parrot, obviously to add some authentic Chinese flavor to a film about a Chinaman.

On May 18, 1927, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened its doors. Soaring 90 feet, it boasted two gigantic coral-red columns supporting a jade-green roof. Between the columns flew a thirty-foot-long stone dragon. Many artifacts, including temple bells, pagodas, and stone “heaven dogs,” had been imported from China and installed by Chinese artisans under the supervision of Chinese film director and poet Moon Quon. Inside the 2,258-seat theater, silver dragons spread across a ceiling sixty feet in diameter, circumscribed by gold medallions. With a pagoda as the box office, the theater also featured ushers dressed in Chinese costumes. An alluring wax statue of Anna May Wong would later grace the lobby. By all accounts, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was, in the words of Hodges, “a monument to Orientalism.”¹³

Entering Hollywood in the midst of its Chinese craze, Charlie Chan, as a charming, exotic Chinaman, held enormous promise for filmmakers, even though reactions to the first three Chan numbers had been lackluster. What they needed to do was to find a good yellow face—or, better yet, a yellowface actor. As it turned out, the person who would save Charlie Chan from literally “falling out of the picture” and would propel the aphorism-spouting detective to stardom was an immigrant hailing not from Canton but from the snowy forests of Scandinavia: the Chinaman Warner Oland.